The Modern Prometheus
by sakuuya
Summary: AU. London, 1893: A young scientist's invention goes terribly awry, leaving the fate of the world in the hands of a motley group of super-powered British girls. No OCs at all!
1. The Bludgeonings of Chance

**The Modern Prometheus**

**Chapter 1: The Bludgeonings of Chance **

This is AU, obviously. I would describe the genre as Lovecraftian steampunk, and if you don't know what that means, well, maybe you will by the end of the story. Basically, though, it takes place in a technologially advanced version of Victorian England.

While this story is NOT an entry, anyone who's interested in AUs should check out Kish's Kittie's AU contest on her Free Imagination forum. ( www .fanfiction .net/topic/40530/8242661/1/)

This story mostly uses dub names, because even though they are, by and large, terrible names, they're somewhat more realistic for characters living in Victorian England than the normal Japanese names. However, certain characters kept their original names, if it suited their role in the story. Yes, that's confusing. Here's a guide to the ones I changed, for those of you who don't wish to sully your minds with actually _seeing_ the dub.

Zoey Hanson/Ichigo Momomiya

Corina Buckswort/Mint Aizawa

Bridgette Verdant/Retasu Midorikawa

Elliot Grant/Ryou Shirogane

Mark (?)/Masaya Aoyama

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of the characters, but the plot is very much mine, and any historical or scientific facts I twisted for my own nefarious purposes will be explained in footnotes.

* * *

_**Victoria Park, Tower Hamelts, London. 1893.**_

Zoey Hanson swung her thin legs back and fourth as she waited on a rather decrepit stone park bench. She was supposed to be meeting up with her fiancé at the park that afternoon, after he was finished helping out at the mission, but (_like the nervous twit you are_, she thought to herself), she had come early, and now, not in view of any clock tower, she couldn't tell if Mark was late or if her worrying was just making time pass like treacle.

o()o

On the other side of the park, across Sewardstone Road and in the private laboratory of Dr. Elliot Grant, Bridgette Verdant pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose.

"Yes, sir, but I don't understand the point of the experiment," she opined in her quiet voice. "Even if your difference engine works, where's the practical application of being able to see into other dimensions?" (1)

Elliot guided her gently away from the machine with one gloved hand. "Well, for one, we'll be able to study our own demesne without all the risks and uncertainties of space flight. And besides," the young doctor smiled what he must have thought was a gentle smile, but which looked wolfish to his assistant, and then added jovially, "Peering beyond the dimensional veil has been the work of mediums and spiritualists for too long. Why should those looneys have all the fun, eh?"

As that was at least half a convincing argument, Bridgette nodded. "Well, we've stored up enough electrostatic power to give her a go, Dr. Grant. I suppose I'm ready when you are."

o()o

Zoey was off in her own little world, mind fogged by the pink, anticipatory cloud of her upcoming nuptials. As such, she didn't see the approaching walkers until they were directly in front of her.

"Hmph," sniffed the young woman who was clearly the nucleus of the group. Her blue-black hair was bound into a fancy bun which, coupled with the way her fashionably lacy dress matched her blue eyes, definitely indicated the upper class. Zoey looked up at the prim sniffling noise, then looked down again when she caught the posh young lady's eye.

"It's such a shame, is it not, the way the homeless are taking over this part of the city?" the black-haired girl commented to her retinue, loud enough for Zoey to hear. Zoey blushed hot, but said nothing, just continued to look down at her clean but somewhat threadbare skirt.

"Certainly is, Miss Bucksworth. A veritable blight on our fair city," simpered one of the other young, fashionable women. "Why, I can hardly fathom why you continue to take exercise in this park."

The black-haired girl raised a dainty, gloved hand. "I've told you before, Miss Meghan, calling me Corina will do. Only servants and guttersnipes need be as formal as that," she replied airily, and Zoey had no doubt that that last part was again directed at her.

o()o

Once he and Bridgette had donned the proper safety equipment, Elliot flipped the necessary switches to activate his difference engine. It had taken weeks to store up enough power to do even this simple test run, and if he was going to take the invention public, he'd need some better form of energy than static collected from the air.

_Maybe lightning_, he mused, _although it would be difficult to harness it in the city_.

Snapping his attention back to the task at hand, he focused in on the difference engine. It was a bulky, squarish box of a machine, topped by a taut canvas screen and framed by two large mercury recitifiers (2). As he watched, a blurry picture fizzed into being on the screen.

"Mother of God," Bridgette breathed when the image focused. Elliot muttered a profanity or two himself.

There on the screen was _him_, undoubtedly him, in a futuristic-looking lab. Instead of Bridgette, though, his assistant appeared to be a young man with long, brown hair pulled into a ponytail. The two were looking at a screen, so technologically advanced that Elliot couldn't begin to guess how it worked, and talking amongst themselves.

"What language is that?" Bridgette questioned, leaning in to hear better. "Doesn't sound like English."

"It's not," Elliot replied, eyes fixed on his doppelganger. "I think it's Japanese. They're talking about a science experiment," he said, lips moving in the pauses as he translated. "Something called a… meow meow project?" He shrugged, and his green-haired assistant shrugged back at him. "How're we doing for power?"

"Power's at 80 percent," she told him efficiently once she managed to tear her eyes away from the other Elliot on the canvas.

There was silence for a minute, both sets of eyes glued to the futuristic scene in front of them. Then Elliot burst out, "Something's gone wrong!"

Indeed, the Japanese men were talking more urgently, and unnameably complex things were flashing and wailing in the background of the image. The two futuristic scientists bustled around their lab, trying to set whatever-it-was right, but to no avail. The warning sirens increased, and then there was a blinding flash of white light.

"We've lost it, sir," Bridgette piped up after a moment of staring at the now-blank screen.

"I'd say we've got bigger problems than that, Miss Verdant. Look at these readings!" She did, and then goggled stupidly at the dials.

"I'm shutting it off, Doctor!" she said, her voice rising. Elliot waved a gloved, dismissive hand at her.

"I don't think that would matter now. Just… Run, all right? Take cover. I don't know what this bloody thing will do if it overloads, and I don't want you getting hurt. Run, Girl!" he shouted when she looked about to protest.

Finally taking the hint, Bridgette bolted out the laboratory door, leaving Elliot alone to disable his creation.

o()o

"'M no' gutter trash," Zoey muttered to herself once Corina was safely out of earshot. "Jus' coz we ain't all nobs like you…" Suddenly impatient, propelled by her annoyance at the condescension, she lept off the bench to go find Mark.

o()o

"Perhaps I was a bit hard on the poor little thing," Corina confided. "It's just… What makes her think it's all right to eyeball me like that"

Her friends muttered fluttering reassurances, but the dark-haired girl's conscious remained uneasy.

o()o

Bridgette ran across the street into Victoria Park, her flight earning her glares from various loungers. She thought, briefly, that she should yell, warn the people, but her natural shyness took over and she stayed silent, and ran.

o()o

Back in the lab, Elliot frantically released all the power he could, in hopes of curbing the difference engine's meltdown. Nothing he could think to do was any help, so eventually he took cover behind an overturned workbench, praying that his equipment wouldn't be harmed.

o()o

_AND_

_THE_

_WORLD_

_WENT_

_WHITE._

* * *

**Footnotes**

1. The difference engine was invented by Charles Babbage in 1822. Contrary to this story, it was basically an early calculator.

2. Mercury arc recitifiers were invented by Peter Cooper Hewitt in 1902. They are used to convert alternating current into direct current, and they look like giant lightbulbs.


	2. A New World of Gods and Monsters

**The Modern Prometheus**

**Chapter 2: A New World of Gods and Monsters**

Hey, all twenty-odd of you who're reading this! Welcome back to the first real chapter (the first one was more of a prologue, really). Mostly, for this chapter, I'm curious to know what you think of how I changed Mark. Environmentalism would be odd in the 19th-century, so his focus has shifted. More than that would be giving stuff away. Happy reading!

* * *

_**Somewhere in Whitechapel, London...**_

_Tawny eyes shoot open, flashing fire like cat's eyes in the darkness as their owner sat up. The eyes narrow, twist as he cocks his head to one side, searching mutely in the silence for the source of the alarum. Nearby, certainly. In the city. More precise than that, he can't tell. Not yet. But he can FEEL the disturbance, the pulse of an alien world thrumming through his bones. Somewhere in London, the dimensional borders are weakening. It's time._

o()o

Elliot sat sleeplessly over the three girls stretched out on makeshift cots around his laboratory, quietly cursing himself. Retrospectively, it wasn't his fault. There was no way he could have known that the difference engine would react like _that_, leaving his lab and, indeed, all the buildings on the street untouched but practically leveling Vicky Park.

That didn't stop him from hating himself as he dug through the rubble, once he realized what had happened. Didn't stop him from nearly driving himself mad with worry as he searched for Bridgette.

He had found her, though, just as he was beginning to brim with hopelessness. She was badly wounded, barely alive, but it was something. As gently as he could, he had dragged Bridgette, along with the two other girls he had found clinging to life amid the dead, back to the lab.

It had taken the rest of the afternoon and well into the night before he was confident that all three girls would survive. Part of him was restless, wanted to go back outside and continue scrabbling through the debris for others, anyone else who might survive, but the majority of his mind knew that to be a hopeless task. Apart from the three young women finally breathing steadily around him, he had seen nothing but death in the decimated park.

All he could do now was wait, and hope, and mutter desperate prayers to a God he hadn't believed in since he was a boy. There was no way he was getting any sleep that night. For all he knew, he might never sleep again.

o()o

Zoey's eyelids felt heavy, and she opened them tenuously, accompanied by a low groan.

"Oh, good," A lovely, unfamiliar male voice said from somewhere above her, "you're up. I wasn't sure how well a sedative would work, so I fear I may have given you a bit much." the voice paused, and there was a sound of footsteps nearing where Zoey lay. "Can you sit up?" A gloved hand, stronger than Zoey expected, grasped her arm and helped her get upright. Once she was sitting steadily, the hand's owner stepped into her line of vision.

He was beautiful, with fashionably-cut blond hair and eyes bluer than any Zoey had ever seen. Faced with all that handsomeness so soon after waking up left Zoey with only one thing to say.

"Whaa?" she moaned articulately.

"I'm glad you're up," he replied with as much warmth and enthusiasm as he could muster. Various groans from around the lab indicated that the other girls were coming to as well. "Can you speak?"

"Cor," Zoey muttered, holding her head. "What 'appened?"

"You were caught in an... accident in the park," Elliot said, feigned warmth giving way to his usual clipped precision. "You were badly wounded, so I brought you back here and fixed you up. My name is Dr. Elliot Grant, and I--"

Whatever he was about to say was cut of by a loud, almost birdlike shriek and a crackling flash of electricity that threw the entire laboratory into stark relief for a moment.

Elliot and Zoey both whirled around to where Corina lay on a cot similar to Zoey's. Unlike Zoey's, though, the black-haired girl was secured to the cot with thick leather straps. She strained against them, twisting and turning in a futile effort to extricate herself.

"She woke up earlier," Elliot answered the unspoken question in Zoey's eyes with a casual, cavalier air "It could have gone better." He moved toward the panicking Corina, who seemed to be causing the incandescent lighting in the laboratory to flicker in time with her shrieks.

"Calm down, miss. If you cannot get control of yourself, I will be forced to sedate you again." Corina's elegant eyes rolled toward the scientist with mad, animal terror, but she clamped her mouth shut, only to open it again for a series of shallow, panicked breaths. Elliot patted her absently on the arm, saying "Good gel. I'll give you a few minutes to get control of yourself, shall I? And then we'll see about getting those restraints off."

By the time Eliot had wandered back over to Zoey, the red-haired girl had swung her legs off the cot, sitting with her feet planted on the floor to regain her sense of equilibrium before she stood up. She looked up at Elliot for reassurance, and he nodded vaguely, all the while staring at her with an intense, vaguely disconcerting curiosity.

Zoey put that strange look out of her mind, though, and pushed herself up off the cot.

She was slightly disoriented, vaguely wobbly, but at the same time she had a sense of solidness and gravity that she couldn't remember feeling before. Her heart beat faster as she took in the new sensation, and suddenly her ears were assaulted by a quick, steady ticking noise. Reflexively, she put her hands to her ears, but that only served to magnify the sound. She brought her hands back down and stared at them, puzzled, but decided that it wasn't worth obsessing over. _It'll go away in it's own time,_ she mentally reassured herself.

As a distraction, she took an experimental step forward. Her movements were a bit jerkier than they should be, and there was a certain sense of inertia that she couldn't place. But at least she was up. She took another step forward, then another, all the while trying to ignore the look of almost predatory inquisitiveness on Dr. Grant's face. Then she took one more step, and that fourth step gave her her first view of Corina.

The posh girl was still restrained, breathing heavily as she forced herself to calm down. The restraints weren't what gave Zoey pause, though. Roughly a third of Corina's face had been covered in what looked like copper. The bright, brassy metal also covered her left arm, which looked as though it had been chopped into sections at the elbow and reattached with a mechanized joint, and her leg was similarly altered.

Zoey's breath caught sharply in her throat. She opened her mouth to scream, but a hand clamped down on her upper arm with a grip like iron. Elliot whirled her around so she was facing him and glared sternly. "If you were to cause that young lady to go back into a panic, Miss Hanson, I would be _very_ displeased with you. Do you understand?"

The words weren't particularly threatening, but their tone was venomous, and Zoey nodded hastily, not wishing to incur her savior's wrath.

"Good," the scientist said shortly after a moment of silence, and released her arm. "And what about you, miss? Do you think you're ready to be untied?" he asked in what Zoey had come to think of as his sugary voice.

On the cot, Corina sucked in a few more shallow breaths before responding. "How _dare_ you restrain me, sir!" she spat, arrogance dripping off every syllable. "Do you have any idea who I am?" A sardonic smile lit Elliot's beautiful face as he undid Corina's straps and helped her sit upright.

"I'm afraid I don't," he replied in a rather insolent voice. "Would you care to enlighten me, miss?"

"Hmph," Corina sniffed, but condescended to inform him, "I am Corina Bucksworth, daughter of Ferrer Bucksworth, and when my father finds out what you've done to me--"

"The Lord Chancellor's daughter?" Elliot cut her off with a chuckle (3). "Do you really think old Bucky will want to see you like this?"

That shut her up quickly. A range of emotions, from rage to terror to anguish, fought their way across her patrician features, and she worked her mouth soundlessly like a fish drowning in air. Eventually, unable to come up with a good retort, she drew her knees up to her chest, flinching at the touch of her copper parts, and turned away from Elliot. The scientist nodded clinically and walked over to the third and final cot. Having nothing better to do, Zoey followed meekly after him.

On the last cot lay Bridgette, eyelids blinking back the sleep as she woke. To Zoey's horror, the green-haired girl's mouth had been replaced by an iron grill, from which her steady breath emerged in steamy puffs. Unlike Zoey and Corina, who were clothed in long, linen shifts, Bridgette appeared to be wearing a button-up men's nightgown. The several top buttons were undone, revealing a boxy iron... something where her chest should have been.

Once she was fully conscious, she raised her head to look at herself. There was that familiar panic, but it only flared for a moment. Then Bridgette exhaled heavily and let her head thunk back onto the pillow.

"Good morning, Miss Verdant. How are you feeling?" Eliot asked as he pulled her upright.

"_Sssurprisssingly well, Doctor, all thingsss consssidered,_" she replied in a harsh, hissing voice. "_What happened?_"

"Ah, well, the difference engine didn't overload quite the way I expected it too," Elliot explained, more sheepishly than Zoey would have believed him capable of. "It tore a big bloody hole in Vicky. You three," he waved a hand toward Zoey and Corina, "were the only survivors I found."

Immediately, Zoey remembered Mark and felt terrible that she hadn't thought of him earlier. _Oh God! If Mark was waiting for me somewhere else in the park... _She teared up at the thought of her fiancé lying dead in the wreckage of Victoria Park.

Or, at least, she scrunched up her eyes. They didn't feel moist at all, though. Nonetheless, Zoey instinctively moved away from Elliot, lest he make some cutting comment about her emotional fragility.

If she had been paying attention, she would have heard Bridgette ask in a low voice, "_Ssso, isss thisss the automaton project you were ssso hesssitant to ssshow me?_"

"More or less," came the answer in an equally hushed tone. "I didn't really expect to have living bodies to test it on. It was touch and go there for a while, having to adjust certain things on the fly, but I'm quite pleased with it."

"_Asss you ssshould be, Doctor. A very sssucesssful exssperiment._"

Zoey wasn't paying attention, though. Instead, she was wallowing in self-pity at losing her fiancé. Introspective as she was, she was almost unsurprised when she imagined Mark was walking through the door, only half-visible from Zoey's position. "Excuse me," Mark said, in that same warm voice that Zoey loved so much, "May I speak to whoever owns this facility? I'm looking for someone..."

_Wait, what?_ Zoey snapped out of her reverie. She was fairly sure that she shouldn't be having a fantasy about the dark-haired boy saying _that_.

"That would be me," Elliot said, navigating his way through the crowded lab toward the door. "I'm Dr. Grant. What can I help you with?"

"I'm looking for my fiancée Her name is Zoey, and I think she was in Vicky Park yesterday," Mark replied with a defeated hopefulness in his voice that made Zoey's heart ache, holding out the sketch they'd gotten at the Battersea Fun Fair the summer before (4). It had taken a while to sit for the portrait, and Zoey, always impatient, wished they could have had a photograph done instead, but Mark was as uncomfortable with photos as he was with other newfangled technologies.

"Well, aren't you just a lucky bastard, then!" Elliot replied mock-innocently, with one of his harsh grins. Mark paused for a moment, not used to hearing such language from an educated man. But then Zoey crept out into full view, and Mark immediately rushed to her and pulled her into an embrace. Normally, this would have made her blush hotly, as they'd never been an exhibitionist couple, but now she was too pleased to see him alive to feel anything but relief.

"Zoey! I thought you'd died!" the dark-haired boy exclaimed, hugging her tighter and burying his face in her hair. Elliot cleared his throat loudly behind Zoey, so they separated hesitantly. For the first time since he entered the lab, Mark managed to tear his eyes away from his fiancée, which meant that he noticed Bridgette and Corina.

The dark-haired young man's face blanched and he stepped involuntarily backwards, toward the door. Corina returned his horrified stare with a depressed, dead-eyed one, as if to say that she felt the same way Mark did, but Elliot was irritated.

"Stop staring, you dolt. You're scaring them."

"Wh-what have you done?" Mark asked fearfully. "What did you do to those girls?" Elliot sighed in annoyance. He was getting so incredibly sick of having to explain.

"They were in the explosion at Vicky," the scientist said flatly. "This was the only way I could save them."

"But then, if _they _were hurt that badly, why is Zoey unharmed?" Mark pressed, trying to wrap his mind around all the strange sights and ideas. Elliot actually laughed aloud at the question.

"Unharmed? My dear boy!" the blond managed through his laughter. "Oh, I assure you, she was anything but!" At Mark's disbelieving look, he added, "If you don't believe me, listen to her heart."

After glancing at Zoey's face to make sure she had no objections, Mark pressed his ear to the red-haired girl's chest. Instead of the familiar _lub-dub_ he was expecting, the heart beat with a curiously regular tick. "I... I don't understand," he said, rising, "What happened to her?"

"Miss Verdant and Miss Bucksworth," Elliot waved a hand in their direction, "suffered very serious external injuries. The results of my attentions, therefore, are quite visible. "Your Miss Hanson, on the other hand, curiously suffered mostly internal injuries. I did what I could with the technologies available to me. Those two--" another hand waved dismissively toward Bridgette and Corina, "Are my experiments with steam and electrical power. Your fiancée... most of her internal functions have been replaced by clockwork."

Mark took a step back from her, eyes wide with horror, and Zoey's throat constricted, though her eyes remained as dry as ever. She should have known this was too good to be true.

But then Mark stepped back up to her and took her (_monstrous, unnatural_, the words ran unbidden through her mind) hands in his. "Zoey, I..." he faltered, his eyes downcast. "You know how I feel about modern technology. It's strange and dangerous and rarely good for humanity. So... I'm scared." Zoey let out a bitter sob and tried to twist out of his grip, but he held onto her. "But Zoey..." he continued, fear and compassion battling in his expression, "I love you. More than anything. I don't care what that man turned you into. I'm going to be here for you no matter what."

He pulled her into another tight embrace. She sobbed dryly into his shoulder, relief flooding her clockwork heart. Bridgette turned away, blushing at such a public display at emotions. Elliot considered trying to break them up again, but decided it wasn't worth the hassle. If Zoey wanted to stay with her Luddite boyfriend, it wasn't his job to stop her.

o()o

_**Wentworth Street, Whitechappel**_

_He blends in with the shadows, like his brother did years ago. But the time wasn't right then. It is now. He can feel the ley lines of this diseased city, and they led him here. All he needs to do is wait until nightfall. He's exactly where he needs to be. This is where it will begin._

* * *

**Footnotes**

3. The actual Lord Chancellor of England in 1893 was Ferrer Herschell, the 1st Baron Herschell. Since Mint's father doesn't have a name, I stole his.

4. The Battersea Fun Fair, a small amusement park, didn't open until 1945. It exists here primarily as a shout-out to Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's _League of Extraordinary Gentlemen._


End file.
